An Intro to Notebooks’ Task Management

If you have been using dedicated task management apps, you may find the simplicity and flexibility in Notebooks refreshingly surprising.

• You can turn any regular book into a task list, so all items in that book will appear as tasks: short notes, multi page documents, photos, PDF documents, everything. The items display a clickable task state icon instead of their document icon.
• Of course you can revert a task list back to a regular book anytime, but Notebooks preserves the state of each task/document, in case you turn the book into a list again.
• You can choose to have specific items still appear as regular documents in the task list, so you can have a mixture of tasks and documents. The documents appear at the top of the list and can serve as reference or introduction to the list.
• Notebooks does not enforce any attributes for your tasks, but you can assign due dates and alert times if you want. There are only a few options, as we strive to keep task management light weight; your energy should go into completing tasks, not into managing them.
• Notebooks provides options to automatically populate task lists for, if you choose.
• Regular books and task lists can coexist anywhere within Notebooks, and you can nest lists in books and books in lists.

Because of this flexibility you might miss the corset of a clear separation between Today, Next, Scheduled etc., but Notebooks covers most of that: when there is at least one due task, or if you set Notebooks to look ahead for due tasks, you will see a smart book Due Tasks at Notebooks’ top level, which functions as a dashboard:

• At the top level of the Due Tasks book you find your due and overdue tasks. This is very much like the Today section in other apps. In Notebooks, you don’t explicitly assign a task to the today section, tasks show up automatically when they reach their set due date.
• You can set Notebooks to look a couple of days ahead and also show tasks that are about to become due. In a way this is like a Scheduled section, because you see tasks with a due date within the next up to seven days.
• Tasks without a due date are obviously set to be done someday, but we don’t think they need an extra section.
• On an iPad or iPhone, the dashboard also provides a Calendar view highlighting the days on which tasks become due. Select a date from the calendar to view the tasks that need to be done on that day. – This also resembles the Scheduled section you may know from other apps.
• A dedicated smart book All Task Lists provides quick access to any task list, no matter where within Notebooks it is stored. Each list shows a badge indicating the number of open and due tasks; you can open the list, view and work on the tasks, change their states etc. This is a convenient shortcut if you want to focus in on your tasks.
• What you may miss is a dedicated Next section, listing the upcoming tasks for various projects. We deliberately skipped that, because we feel that it is more efficient to concentrate on a specific project and decide what to do next, instead of looking at a set of more or less unrelated tasks. But maybe this is just the way we work 😉
• To complement the dashboard view you can also use Notebooks’ Context Tags. So if you want a specific group Someday, for example, you create a context and assign that to selected tasks.

We hope that this brief overview can help you get familiar with Notebooks’ way of task management. Read more…